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Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

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Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#11

Post by dredmorbius »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #10
dredmorbius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's critical to realise that the main role journals play among active, tenure-track academics is in restricting upward professional growth . If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals. Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not cha…

Tenure-track academia is an exercise in restricting upward professional growth, anyway. It's built into the system. When you've chosen the tenure track, you know you might be spending a decade at a school nobody has ever heard of pumping out research nobody is ever gonna read. There are some stars undoubtedly but there are only so many tenure track jobs. Academics have embraced that system for a long time, the journa…

The question is: where do you place control of that gate, and what consequences derive from that.

Counterpoint: if closed-access journals are no longer the constraint, how does that change the overall academic landscape? For better or worse?

Information filters will remain, and they will remain imperfect.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#12

Post by aaron-lebo »

dredmorbius wrote: post #11
aaron-lebo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tenure-track academia is an exercise in restricting upward professional growth, anyway. It's built into the system. When you've chosen the tenure track, you know you might be spending a decade at a school nobody has ever heard of pumping out research nobody is ever gonna read. There are some stars undoubtedly but there are only so many tenure track jobs. Academics have embraced that system for a long time, the journa…

The question is: where do you place control of that gate, and what consequences derive from that. Counterpoint: if closed-access journals are no longer the constraint, how does that change the overall academic landscape? For better or worse? Information filters will remain, and they will remain imperfect.

My perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year.

My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything anyway. If you're bored you can Google and grab the pdf. The closed nature hasn't been any real constraint and for the majority of researchers it isn't. You spend more time as a researcher filtering out material that is irrelevant and even now there are a ton of mediocre journals. To answer your question, the effect on the overall academic landscape will probably be minimal.

It's an obvious and easy target - hey, look at this cartel which dominates academia, but academia is a giant cartel, anyway, where everyone follows arbitrary restrictions and rituals because that's how you get a degree and a job. You can even argue (not sure it's believable) that this dynamic is useful - if you want to get access to the world's academic information, you need to get plugged into an institution with scholars around you who can help guide, inform, and interpret your work and the work of others and even if that isn't strictly necessary, it's more beneficial than not. If you're interested in "serious" research, you've probably already self-selected into this system of controlled but essentially free access already.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#13

Post by rhizome »

llukas wrote: post #7
aaron-lebo wrote: post #4

This means it is our duty to the citizens to reduce our publishing expenses to no more than currently ~US$200m per year (and we would even increase the value of the literature by making it open to boot!). If we were to do that, we’d have US$9.8b every single year to buy all the different infrastructure solutions that already exist to support all our intellectual outputs, be that text, data or code. Is is also our dut…

If Elsevier and others want to keep their monopolies they need to justify the following: How it is possible that they take: - free labor (reviews done by scientists) - free content (articles created by government money mostly) Then they magically become owners of that content and are permitted by society to charge obscene amount of money. Also fuck you and your ignorance, that is why we cannot have nice things.

See also: WestLaw[1] and, in opposition, Carl Malamud[2].

1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/West_Publishing_Co._v._Mead_D....

2. http://www.usglassmag.com/2016/01/cases-shed-light-on-copyri...

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#14

Post by apathy »

nyolfen wrote: post #3

elbakyan surely belongs to the category of contemporary outlaw-/folk-heroes. at least she is in my personal pantheon.

I send her $5 a month and it's 1000x more valuable than HBO go or any of that sort of shit.

She is quite simply a hero, full stop.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#15

Post by jummyfo »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #12
dredmorbius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: where do you place control of that gate, and what consequences derive from that. Counterpoint: if closed-access journals are no longer the constraint, how does that change the overall academic landscape? For better or worse? Information filters will remain, and they will remain imperfect.

My perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year. My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything a…

"essentially free access" costs libraries thousands to millions of dollars a year. For publicly funded or resource constrained institutions librarians have to make hard choices about what they can cancel just to pay for the more expensive journals. Why should publishers get all of this money?

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#16

Post by nsaslideface »

It is rare that true heroism can be framed as a catchy story. Those working for campaign finance reform is another example. People who fight "David-like" against these Goliaths are doing extremely radical work, and they will be canonized in the coming centuries. They don't get the semi-celebrity of Snowden or Ellsberg in the present day because they lack the whistleblower story of one person verses the full power of the federal government - the only sort of punishments they face are an unsexy sinking into obscurity, or a quiet snuffing-out such as with Aaron Swartz.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#17

Post by heliophobicdude »

apathy wrote: post #14
nyolfen wrote: post #3

elbakyan surely belongs to the category of contemporary outlaw-/folk-heroes. at least she is in my personal pantheon.

I send her $5 a month and it's 1000x more valuable than HBO go or any of that sort of shit. She is quite simply a hero, full stop.

If you don't minD telling us, how do we send her money to support her?

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#18

Post by aaron-lebo »

jummyfo wrote: post #15
aaron-lebo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year. My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything a…

"essentially free access" costs libraries thousands to millions of dollars a year. For publicly funded or resource constrained institutions librarians have to make hard choices about what they can cancel just to pay for the more expensive journals. Why should publishers get all of this money?

They should not, but that's not to say out of all the things wrong with academia that it's a real chokepoint for research. It's just one small part of a system which throws away millions every year.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#20

Post by aaron-lebo »

nsaslideface wrote: post #16

It is rare that true heroism can be framed as a catchy story. Those working for campaign finance reform is another example. People who fight "David-like" against these Goliaths are doing extremely radical work, and they will be canonized in the coming centuries. They don't get the semi-celebrity of Snowden or Ellsberg in the present day because they lack the whistleblower story of one person verses the full power of…

"True heroism" is raising your kid well because it's the right thing to do even though nobody except your kid and maybe grandkid will ever know what you did.

These people have gotten their acknowledgments (as they should), let's not act like they are nobodies in the shadow of history. You're reading about them on HN precisely because media knows who they are. How many people have documentaries made about them after they are dead?

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